And we're off...

We are on our way! Last night we had dinner with the family and got Halle Kate all settled into her temporary home at Bill & Alicia's house. Leaving Halle Kate was certainly the hardest thing we have done in a while and we are still a little emotional. We will get better and probably worse again as the trip goes on. Some of our emotions are the sheer fact that we have had NO SLEEP! We never even sat down last night after we got home to finish packing. We left the house around 4:15 to go to the airport to start our journey. We have already seen God's favor at the airport this morning. Needless to say only being able to check one bag each due to the CHINA regulation makes things hard. We worked and re-worked and finally decided we'll just take our chances and pay the excess baggage weight limit fee! We got to the Continential Airlines kiosk and began to check in to get our boarding passes and the lady at the desk came to help us and we were able to tell her what we were doing and she took a liking to us! She looked at our bags and lifted one a bit and said "oh that isn't over 50 pounds!" A five year old would have known that we were over our limit. Those bags were already huge and stuffed tight! She went and printed our tags and off we went! Oh and since we were having such favor we decided to ask her to work on our return flight seats. They didn't have all 3 of us together so she looked around a bit and put us all together!! Thank You Lord!! Now if we can just continue that favor when we travel in country on Saturday, we will be doing great! We are in Newark and our flight for Beijing leaves in about 45 minutes! A 13 hours & 45 minutes...PRAY! We arrive in Beijing at 2pm in the afternoon which is 1am in Alabama! We are still saying to each other how this just doesn't feel real yet! We have just waited so long and now it is finally here! We'll post next time from BEIJING, CHINA!!